Hot on the heels of the recent Google Calendar release, the Zend Developer Zone has posted a quick tutorial on using the Zend Framework to consume the data the calendaring service provides.

A couple of weeks ago, Google jumped into the online calendar space by launching Google Calendar (um, beta). The application is chock-full of Ajaxy goodness and plenty of features, but I'm here to talk about what you can do with your calendar data behind the scenes. Using some handy tools from the Swiss Army Knife that is the Zend Framework, I'll show you how to pull data from your Google Calendar into your site. Just for kicks, I'll also throw in a caching layer to keep things fast and reduce the network traffic between your server and Google.

The framework makes the script simple, a matter of pulling in the feed with the Zend_Feed module and caching it with Zend_Cache. The example grabs the latest data from the RSS feed, parses it into values to store in a server-side cache (in /tmp) and loops through each item to display the relevant event details.